Friday’s ad is another for Budweiser, from 1972. The tagline is “Pick a Pair of Six-Packs” and the ad features a pair of blonds holding a six-packs above their heads. But it’s their outfits that really make the ad; bell bottoms with Bud labels, bare midriffs and white shirts with another Bud label over each breast pocket. Oh, and a red sash tied around their waist. Behind them is a five-piece band in a male version of the same getup. Classic.
Firestone-Walker Brewing just posted a cool video shot in the brewery, with great production values and music. I’m not sure if we’ll see it anytime soon on television, even cable, but it’s better than most of the beer ads currently running.
Here’s an interesting infographic created by, of all people, Term Life Insurance, showing The World’s Strongest & Strangest Beers.
Here’s a close-up of the strongest beers.
And another close-up of the strangest beers.
Here’s a very interesting piece (shared by Maureen Ogle; thanks Maureen) by Rachel Laudan, and excerpted from the book The Gastronomica Reader. It’s all about the myths of how food used to be in the “good old days” and how many positive improvements to our health and well-being were a direct result of food production and processing becoming more modern and industrialized. The article was reprinted in the Utne Reader as In Praise of Fast Food. It’s pretty thought-provoking.
Laudan concludes with this:
Nostalgia is not what we need. What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it; an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labor; and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial. Such an ethos, and not a timorous Luddism, is what will impel us to create the matchless modern cuisines appropriate to our time.
Today is the 34th anniversary of a momentous moment in the short history of craft beer. On October 8, 1976, the New Albion Brewery was incorporated in the State of California. Though the brewery opened in July the following year, it only lasted until 1982 or 83. It was ahead of its time, way ahead. But it was the first small brewery to be built from scratch, mostly by hand, using junkyard parts and old dairy equipment. To me, and many others, that makes it the first modern craft brewery and its legacy should be remembered, revered and celebrated. Its founder, Jack McAuliffe, essentially shied away from the brewing community after 1983, returning to his original profession as an engineer. As a result, few people — except us old-timers and historians — give McAuliffe his due. A lot of young brewers and fans don’t know his name, though that, happily, is changing.
Maureen Ogle managed to track down McAuliffe through his daughter for her book, Ambitious Brew, and in it she gives a great account of New Albion Brewery.
Sierra Nevada recently lured McAuliffe to Chico to collaborate on a beer for their 30th anniversary. Jack & Ken’s Ale, a black barley wine, came out recently, and that seems to be the beginning of a resurgence or renaissance for Jack McAuliffe. He’s back in the public eye, and people are writing once more about his lasting impact on the craft beer industry. Here are a few places he’s been mentioned:
Then there’s The birthday of craft beer, written by me for my newspaper column. It was supposed to run this Wednesday but got bumped to next week, which happens occasionally. But it did go online this week, in time to raise a toast tonight
My idea is to designate today as the “birthday of craft beer,” a holiday to celebrate New Albion Brewery, Jack McAuliffe and the thousands of small breweries that followed to create the beer landscape we all enjoy today. Working with the California Small Brewers Association, we’re going to petition the state to recognize October 8, 2011 in some fashion as the 35th anniversary and the birthday of craft beer. If you’d like to help that effort, drop me a line and when we have a better idea what needs to happen, I’ll reach out to you. For now, today is the 34th anniversary, and the birthday of craft beer, so join me in raising a glass to Jack McAuliffe, New Albion Brewery and all the great beer that’s flowed since 1976. Happy birthday craft beer.
Here’s one of the original New Albion labels. The original sign from the New Albion Brewery now hangs on the wall at Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa. Stop by and see it anytime you like. To see what New Albion looked like, check out breweriana collector Jess Kidden’s page on New Albion Brewing, where he’s reproduced two articles that appeared in Brewer’s Digest in 1979 and 80.
Thursday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1956. It’s part of their “Where There’s Life … there’s Budweiser” campaign and features a great illustration of a dinner party scene through a glass of beer.
Tom Dalldorf did a great interview with Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada Brewing for the most recent issue of the Celebrator Beer News. The new issue features part of the interview and also Grossman on the cover for Sierra Nevada’s 30th anniversary this year.
The entire interview is just under 30 minutes and was done last month in Chico. Enjoy.
A Conversation with Ken Grossman from Wing and Wing Productions on Vimeo.
Wednesday’s ad is for Budweiser, from 1979. The “Taste Buds” ad campaign was one of the goofiest ones they ever did. It didn’t last very long, but it sticks out in my memory, for whatever that’s worth. This is a print ad for the campaign, but it was really the television ads where its complete goofiness came out. So below this I’ve included two of those.
A 1979 Budweiser “Taste Buds” Ad:
And Another One with Pizza:
If you read my previous post about Inflating Binge Drinking Statistics, you’ve seen how data can be manipulated and essentially bent to any purpose. Today a second news item in U.S. News & World Report, 1 in 4 U.S. Teens and Young Adults Binge Drink, presents yet another portrait of reality using binge drinking data from the CDC.
This one focused more on underage drinking, declaring that 1 in 4 U.S. teens and young adults are binge drinkers. According to CDC director Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, “[n]inety percent of the alcohol consumed by high school students is consumed in the course of binge drinking.” Frieden goes on to say that “[a]mong drinkers, one-third of adults and two-thirds of high school kids binge drink, but doesn’t that contradict the 1 in 4 statistic and the 90% declaration? Which is it: 25%, 66% or 90%?
Beyond the fuzzy math, that high school students binge drink is a bit of a duh statistic, they don’t exactly have much choice under the circumstances. That’s because all underage drinking is done underground, none of it is out in the open. So any time they do get a chance to drink it’s without supervision. And that’s a direct result of the minimum age being 21 instead of 18 and also because not only is education not available, but is even considered criminal in some states. It was not unusual when I was a teenager for parties where alcohol was served to be chaperoned by parents with the full knowledge of other parents, too. Today, that would be cause in many places for arrests and jail time. But as a result of adult supervision, I never witnessed any problems at those parties and they were very safe. But thanks to zealotry and a no tolerance policy such safe environments are now impossible.
Another discrepancy is that in the U.S. News & World Report, the CDC claims that “more than 33 million adults have reported binge drinking in the past year.” That’s in contrast to the NPR story, in which the CDC claims that “half of all alcohol consumed by adults in the US is binge drinking.” Then on the CDC’s website there’s a map of the U.S. showing binge drinking averages by state, with the lowest state being Tennessee (with 6.8%) and the highest being Wisconsin (23.9%).
The biggest problem with binge drinking statistics is that the definition keeps changing. Over the last few decades it’s gone from somewhat vague to an increasingly narrow definition. Each change in the definition increases the number of binge drinkers. It’s not that more people are binge drinking necessarily, but that more people fall under the definition as they lower it and lower it.
At the bottom of an NPR story, Binge Drinking: A Big Problem, Especially For The Prosperous, there’s a strange little video about binge drinking put together by the CDC. In it, they reveal some disturbing ways of looking at what it means to binge drink.
The most recent way our government defines binge drinking is “[f]our or more drinks within a few hours for a woman and five or more for a man.” That actually narrows yet again, as recently as the last few years it’s been “five or more drinks in a row,” which tends to imply more speed. Adding “within a few hours” means even drinking at a leisurely pace makes you a binge drinker. I wrote more about this shift last year in a post, Inventing Binge Drinking.
The CDC video further claims that “half of all alcohol consumed by adults in the US is binge drinking.” Wow, that’s pretty remarkable, especially if you consider that according to the DOJ only 54% of adults drink alcohol. We’re now a nation of binge drinkers. You’d think a society where 1 in 2 people drinking is on a bender would be more noticeable. But look out your door or window and unless there’s a car alarm going off, it’s more likely you’ll hear crickets and birds chirping, not the devastation implied by that alarming factoid.
They also claim “1.5 billion episodes of binge drinking” take place each year in the U.S. That’s 5 for every man, woman and child in the country, or 6.25 times for every adult. If we assume the DOJ’s statistic that 46% of adults don’t drink alcohol, then that’s 11.6 for every adult who does imbibe, or nearly once a month. That’s a lot of benders. Or is it? Is having five drinks less than once a month really an alarming societal problem? I go to a beer dinner probably at least once a month and most are at least five courses. That makes me a binge drinker, but I’m hardly a danger to society because of it. Clearly, for some individuals persistent binge drinking is a serious problem, but the people who fall into that category represent a very small minority of all drinkers.
Toward the end of the NPR article, they have this to add.
The problem, though bad, isn’t a lot worse than it used to be. In 1993, the CDC says, about 14 percent of adults had gone on drinking binges. But as Dr. Thomas Frieden, head of the CDC put it, “Because binge drinking is not recognized as a problem, it has not decreased in 15 years.”
That’s a pretty glaring inconsistency. On one hand, the CDC claims that “half of all alcohol consumed by adults in the US is binge drinking” but only “14 percent of adults had gone on drinking binges.” But my favorite howler is the statement that “binge drinking is not recognized as a problem.” What planet is he living on, because neo-prohibitionists and the health, university and government research communities, not to mention all the treatment and addiction businesses that stand to make more money if the problem keeps increasing, have been screaming about the perils of binge drinking as long as I’ve been an adult, and probably longer. And the hue and cry has only increased in recent decades. But this just serves to prove that binge drinkers aren’t born, they’re created … by statistics.
But wait, it gets worse. According to the CDC video, the NIAAA now defines binge drinking as “consumption that raises blood-alcohol content to .08%.” That’s right folks “binge drinking” and being “drunk” are now exactly the same! Then they go on to say that binge drinkers are “14 times more likely to drive drunk.” Duh, if you define binge drinking as getting drunk, then that’s a self-fulfilling statistic, isn’t it? But it’s pretty alarming that a government agency’s standard for binge drinking is simply drinking enough to raise your BAC to 0.08%.
Other interesting tidbits include that statistic that 70% of binge drinkers are 26 or older and that 80% of binge drinkers are not alcoholics. Of course they’re not alcoholics if all they have to do to binge drink is get drunk once. And if most are legal adults, why the insistence later in the video to maintain 21 as the minimum age of consumption?
Naturally, they propose all the same old chestnuts to “fix” the problems they just created by inflating the statistics. Nothing new is ever proposed. Of course, none of the proposals ever work, either, wherever they’ve been implemented. Here’s the CDC recommendations.
But by continually widening the net and artificially adding to the number of people that are considered binge drinkers, it lessens the chances of actually helping the people who truly do need help. All they do is increasingly demonize alcohol manufacturers and criminalize law-abiding people. It’s as if all of the organizations that are anti-alcohol or who make their money from addiction, be it through treatment, medications or whatever, need to keep the issue a dangerous one and have to keep it just bad enough so the money keeps flowing. So it becomes a game of creating the perception of effectiveness while the problem remains perpetually, and conveniently, elusive.